...the usual line-up of melee, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher, overpowered exotic thing that you never get ammo for and only use in boss fights anyway...
The Standard FPS Guns are a set of weaponry that a player can reasonably expect to be present in most every First-Person Shooter (and similar genres, like Third Person Shooters) in one form or another. These guns have effectively become genre convention — players expect certain weapons to work certain ways, so most games generally stick with the status quo in order to avoid confusing players by switching things up too much. This certainly isn't a bad thing — part of the reason it became the status quo in the first place is that it provides a good mix of weapon types allowing for varied and interesting gameplay and leaving enough room to cater to players with different preferences.
But without further ado, the weapons:
Melee
The most basic attack in your repertoire: hitting stuff! May take a variety of forms, from
punching things to combat knives to more character-specific items (like
Gordon Freeman's iconic
crowbar). In modern games, it's become more common for melee strikes to be a separate command rather than just another weapon — so that no matter what weapon you're using, hitting the melee button will let you use a
Pistol Whip (or rifle butt, or
bayonet, or whatever's appropriate for the weapon you have equipped at the moment). In general, melee attacks are fast but weak compared to other weapons, and never run out of ammo (making them your default
Emergency Weapon) but suffer from short range for obvious reasons. Some games have slightly more elaborate melee subsystems, where the type of attack you use (and thus the speed and power of the hit) depends on how you're moving, how long you hold the melee button, or other factors. It's also common to give melee weapons unique abilities, like faster movement when they're equipped, or allowing for melee weapons to perform stealth kills and
Back Stabs.
Less prevalent than they once were, but some games have a second melee weapon available, usually one that's more powerful in exchange for giving up one of the basic melee weapon's advantages. It may be slower, or require ammo, or lack special abilities like stealth kills. The classic form of this is the chainsaw — powerful, but requires fuel (and may take a minute to rev up before it can be used), but any number of other weapons fit the archetype as well.
The most basic firearm in most games is a small semiautomatic pistol. It will usually be fairly weak in terms of damage, but highly accurate, rapid-firing, and capable of holding a lot of ammo (both per clip and in reserve). Usually a staple of combat in the early game, it will be effective against basic
Mooks and small, fast moving but weak enemies, but its effectiveness tends to trail off as the game progresses and you start to face tougher enemies with more health. The ability to
use two at once is common and helps alleviate this.
A pistol variant that packs far more punch at the cost of being slower to fire and holding less ammo, generally either a large-caliber semiautomatic (the .50 caliber Desert Eagle
note for reference, that's the same size bullet fired by some heavy machine guns and anti-materiel sniper rifles or
generic equivalent is especially popular) or a similarly large-caliber revolver.
Generally not a separate weapon, but some games treat their pistol-equivalent this way — either absurdly powerful, absurdly accurate, or both. This is used as a way to avoid having the pistol eventually fall afoul of the
Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness and eventually becoming useless later in the game, but it's sometimes overdone to the point where there's rarely a good reason to use anything
but the pistol.
Submachine Gun — SANDBOX NOTE: not sure if this deserves its own section or if it should be listed as a pistol variant
A submachine gun is an automatic weapon that fires pistol-caliber ammunition. This means that it's got a
high rate of fire, but individual shots aren't as powerful as a rifle or machine gun. In gameplay terms, submachine guns often share an ammo pool with pistols, effectively making the SMG a pistol that trades accuracy for rate of fire. Like the basic pistol, the SMG is often available for
dual wielding, trading
even more accuracy for
even more rapid fire.
An extremely powerful but
short ranged weapon, ideal for dealing with powerful foes in close quarters. The basic shotgun usually comes in one of three forms: a double-barrel break-barrel shotgun (where you load one shell per barrel, directly into the chamber), a pump-action weapon with a moderate clip size (which lets you do cool reload animations like the
One-Handed Shotgun Pump), or an automatic shotgun (which is faster-firing and often comes with a large drum magazine, but can be overkill and burn through your ammo reserves needlessly fast).
The most common shotgun variant is simply a standard shotgun with most of the barrel cut off — almost always the double-barrel type. In gameplay terms, these tend to be even
shorter ranged than a normal shotgun, but more powerful
for some reason. In reality, they're both less accurate
and less powerful, their only advantage being that they're easier to conceal, but that's rarely a concern in video games.
Assault Rifle
